Rhonda Sabo, PsyD
Excerpted from the October, 2005 NESTTD Newsletter
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
As we prepare to host our first Quarterly Meeting of the year with a workshop entitled Abandoning the Body: Trauma, Eating Disorders, and Dissociation, I find myself thinking about the challenges and frustrations of helping clients to end the war with their bodies. I am so thankful that Laura Weisberg will be guiding us through much of the complex terrain of trauma and eating disorders in her workshop. I won’t be talking about that topic in this letter. But I hope you will bear with me as I share a few summertime scribblings about the related subjects of holding together and wrapping, about repair and restoration.
As I write this it is July… My books are packed up as I prepare to move my office, my home in Newport is torn apart as it undergoes extensive repairs, and down the street from me the Touro synagogue, built in 1763, is shut down, carefully wrapped like a big square package and hidden from view as 22 layers of paint (some of it containing lead) are removed during its complete restoration.
I have just come from SSTAR in Fall River, an agency with Substance Abuse, Mental Health and Women’s Center components, where I do a twice-monthly trauma consultation group. Today I stopped in the office of my friend, substance abuse counselor and SSTAR administrator, Ula Ward. On this hot July day we stood in her large room, gazing at piles and piles of colorful, some wildly patterned, hand-knit woolen blankets, shawls, socks, sweaters, vests and hats. During this year I have witnessed the gradual transformation of Ula’s office into its current wacky boutique state—The piles today have so completely taken over the room that it looked like a page from a Dr Seuss book!
The explanation for the piles is “afghans for Afghans”, a project to send (either knitted or crocheted) woolen blankets and clothes hand-made by people in America--for people in Afghanistan. * Anyway, after Ula joined the “afghans for Afghans” knitting project, others at SSTAR followed, including, I am told, some clients with trauma histories of their own, in recovery from addictions. The knitting project was having a very positive effect on everyone who participated, Ula told me. In fact a couple of women had completely stopped relapsing after years of struggle.
I have never studied occupational therapy, but I can imagine some possible explanations for the effectiveness of knitting for traumatized clients with addictions. Knitting is rhythmic and repetitive, involving alternating hands and brain hemispheres. Knitting quiets the autonomic nervous system. The repetitive stitches, rows and patterns offer the knitter a sense of order, control and containment. Knitting for a far-off child in need may stimulate feelings of attachment and connection. With the completed garment, there is a sense of mastery. And participation in the group of volunteers brings a sense of meaning and purpose and belonging.
And beyond their usefulness for keeping out the cold, I also find myself imagining the significance of these “wraps”, for those Afghan people receiving them. It is no accident that when people suffer psychological disorganization that we use the euphemism that they are “not too tightly wrapped” or that they can’t “hold it together”. When people have not been welcomed into the world as infants, they often experience themselves as bursting from within. And after trauma, survivors often experience themselves as incapable of protection from any intrusion, from within or from without. On the leather sofa in my office, I happen to have a knitted shawl. When clients feel too fragmented, disorganized, or afraid, when they do not feel contained enough within the boundary of their skin, they know that they can put the shawl around their shoulders—and experience being more safely “held together”. Years ago I also came up with a hypnotic protocol for my dissociative clients who had trouble feeling safe, that I refer to as the “Safety Quilt”. In trance the client can collaborate with me to wrap themselves in a protective blanket made [up] of knitted squares created by and for, different alters/parts and stitched together into one.
As I looked through Laura Weisberg’s bibliography for her October 1, NESTTD workshop, I was interested that she has listed Jean Goodwin and Reina Attias (Eds.) Splintered Reflections: Images of the Body in Trauma.** I particularly recall a chapter in this wonderful book in which Goodwin reflects on a folktale from Southern India, The Flowering Tree.*** The tale is about a young woman, who learns the secret of magically turning herself into a fragrant flowering tree by pouring water over herself. The young woman’s gift of transforming her self into a beautiful tree benefits others—she supports her mother by selling the flowers, and gives pleasure to her husband through their beauty. Tragically, one time during the process of transforming herself into a flowering tree, the young woman undergoes abuse by jealous family members who tear at her branches and break them. When she returns to human form, she is left with stumps where her arms and legs used to be—so deformed as to be unrecognizable and unable to communicate her trauma story.
Grieving and depressed over his loss, her husband searches for her. When they meet up, although she is deformed beyond recognition, his newly developed empathy allows her to reveal her old identity to him—and she suggests how he might help to heal and restore her. He is to pour water over her while she once more transforms herself into a tree. Then he is to help her by binding up her branches in the places where they were broken. Again, in The Flowering Tree, the image of wrapping and holding together appears. Restoration occurs as the result of caring collaboration between partners, the trauma survivor, who is given a voice in controlling the treatment, and the compassionate helper, within a treatment framework in which they return together to attend to each traumatic wound.
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Before I close a few announcements:
As we all know, treating dissociative disorder involves acquiring some specific clinical skills*1. If you want to read some of the classic literature on treatment of DD’s, you may want to sign up to take the nine-session ISSD Course called the Dissociative Disorders Psychotherapy Program. The DDPTP course is being offered in the Boston area again this fall by Jim Chu, M.D. and Audrey Wagner Ph.D. The same course will being taught again in Rhode Island by myself and E. Belle Evans, Ph.D. In addition there is also an online DDPTP course available. To find out more about these DDPTP courses, go to www.issd.org and click on Professional Training.
As we highlight the excellent work of some of our NESTTD committees in newsletters this year, the current newsletter contains an article about new projects of our Education and Outreach committee. If you are interested in joining a committee please contact board members or committee chairs or by emailing us at nesttd@comcast.net. At this time we particularly need volunteers to join the Publicity and Membership committees.
Finally, we are inviting members to stay after the October 1 Quarterly Meeting for our 2nd Annual Members Networking Get-Together. A light lunch will be served.
Looking forward to seeing you October 1!
Yours truly,
*. If you are interested in learning more about the knitting for Afghanistan go to www.afghansforafghans.org.
** I can’t locate my copy of Goodwin and Attias book, Splintered Reflections but I recommend it highly—you can find a review of it (it appeared in a former NESTTD Newsletter) in the articles section at www.nesttd.org.
*** A. K. Ramanujan, 1997. A Flowering Tree and other Oral Tales from India. Berkeley/London: University of California Press.